10 ms·

Side Projects

238 points by pointnova 11y ago

WA 11y ago
> I suspect that some of that is the effort to build and launch something that can reach broad adoption is harder. No, it's just that getting attention is a lot harder. Side projects – by its very nature – are exactly that: Some stuff happening on the side and the trash can is an even more certain path than for most startups. Without any visibility, side projects won't turn into companies. This doesn't mean that there are no side projects. There are probably more than ever, because everybody tries to get into the startup hamster wheel with their little idea.
- galistoca 11y ago
  If anything I think getting attention has become much easier compared to say 5 years ago. You used to have to go to Techcrunch and their friends to get covered or your project would never have any other means of getting significant attention for the launch. Nowadays sites like HN and Product Hunt provide pretty much democratized way of getting attention for your projects. On the other hand, getting meaningful adoption has indeed become harder, exactly because getting attention has become easier. There are too many projects and startups launching everyday that even if you place 1st on PH or HN today, tomorrow people are onto the next shiny thing.
  - WA 11y ago
    If you launch a product for Non-English people, there is no HN and no PH. Even if you launch a product in English, there's HN, there's PH and that's about it. You better have another way to reach an audience, because HN & PH are one-shots – especially if you just try a thing or two marketing-wise for your side-project, but don't spend too much time and money on marketing.
    - galistoca 11y ago
      Those I mentioned are just a few. You have Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and all kinds of social media where you can get exposure, which didn't exist several years ago. You really had to chase journalists at conferences, buy a PR firm to reach out to them, get an intro to these guys, or just send a cold email and hope for the best. Now at least you can control your own destiny.
      - palakchokshi 11y ago
        Having built and launched 2 products that started as side projects, I know how difficult it is to get visibility. The avenues you mention are long shots considering the sheer number of things that get posted on those mediums. You get lost in noise faster than you can hit refresh. What you need is evangelists. People who noticed your product and were "socially influential" enough to spread it to a significant number of your target audience. That is a rare occurrence.
        galistoca 11y ago
        Everyone who's downvoting or criticizing me is basically saying "yeah whatever, but it's easier said than done", and that is totally true. But you guys are missing my point, I'm saying objectively there are more avenues for exposure than before. 10 years ago, you really had to use PR agencies and send out press releases, do analyst briefings, and nurture relationship with journalists in order to get the word out. There really weren't many other ways to do this. If you were a small startup it was very hard to get exposure (and like you say, you need evangelists, but even that was harder in the past simply because small startups had no easy way to get the word out) Compare that to nowadays, you're playing on very much level field. There's a big difference between "it's not so easy although it's possible if I try hard enough" vs. "it's virtually impossible".
        palakchokshi 11y ago
        I see your point that there are more avenues available than before but more avenues != easier to get your product noticed. I think that's where others and me disagree with your premise. I employed all those avenues to promote my 2 products. Anecdotal evidence from end is that a post on HN by someone with high karma still got me all of 200 visits to the website. Getting on the Featured List on PH got 2 signups and 50 upvotes and a total of 156 visits to the website. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ combined totaled 300+ visits to the website.
  - blackrose 11y ago
    Product Hunt is really only "democratized" if you know someone who can post to the Featured list. For the rest of us, it's either the obscurity of the "Newest" list, or basically the same exact process as getting covered by someone at TC.
    - galistoca 11y ago
      Let's not battle with semantics. There are more venues to get exposure nowadays and the gatekeepers at these venues have much less power than the ones that came before, hence more democratized than 5 years ago.
      - enraged_camel 11y ago
        It's not "semantics" if the end result is the same, which is that you need to beg certain gatekeepers to give your product exposure. The fact that there are more of those gatekeepers now doesn't mean the process is more "democratized."
        galistoca 11y ago
        Can't believe I keep feeding you guys stuff so I can get even more downvoted, but this almost feels like talking to a wall. This is my last comment on this thread because I know you'll probably say I'm wrong again, but I'll try my best to explain. 5 years ago if you built a cool project or startup you would pitch TechCrunch, Mashable, etc. (a handful of sites), and that was it. Most likely it would have been ignored. Then there's not much you can do. Nowadays there's room for creativity. You can even reach out to people on Twitter via @messages and get their attention. That didn't exist before. Also you guys make it sound like getting through the Product Hunt "gatekeepers" is some mission impossible but that only means you haven't tried, because if you tried you would know that they are also people just like you and want to share cool products. My point is, in the past, unless you spend lots of money you had little power over whether your project gets attention or not. Nowadays if you're on HN complaining about how it's same as back then, you're probably doing it wrong. There are tons of ways you can get exposure for your projects and you're not trying hard enough or not being creative enough if you're saying it's the same.
  - nostrademons 11y ago
    The absolute number of venues where you can get attention has increased, but the number of projects competing for that attention is increasing faster. The amount of attention available per project goes down.
  - herval 11y ago
    I feel getting a megaphone has become considerably easier - try putting up anything on, say, betalist, and you'll get dozens and dozens of bots tweeting at you, offering free megaphones. Now getting _attention_? I feel everything is competing with autoplay videos on Facebook now. Microseconds of mindshare.
- JMiao 11y ago
  fred's point is that competing for attention these days feels like you have to build broader, which is something you see a lot and probably contradicts the one secret weapon startups possess, focus.
- shopkins 11y ago
  Right, everyone is still experimenting on the side now especially because those little ideas are the best route to autonomy. And if you have a wide breadth of skills in the field, a startup is often the only way (I've found) to finally gain the freedom to use all of them.
  - api 11y ago
    > if you have a wide breadth of skills in the field, a startup is often the only way (I've found) to finally gain the freedom to use all of them. That's a great point, and is a major factor that led me into startups. Doing a startup is the only time I've ever had a job that feels like my time is not being wasted. With everything else I feel under-challenged, under-utilized, and pigeonholed.
    - shopkins 11y ago
      Same! When either building something myself or with under 5 people I've been able to use all my knowledge and truly stretch myself. But I've also worked at a "startup" with the wrong people in charge, where I was completely under-utilized and couldn't get challenging work despite asking for it. The chance for fulfilling work though, I think, is the biggest draw.
draw_down 11y ago
Easy to quit and get seed funding, sure. But when it's time to raise an A round...
acconrad 11y ago
This is a great point - experimentation is huge and a big part of my own growth as an entrepreneur. To me I feel better knowing my side project work isn't sucking up someone's money when it doesn't work out, and I'm building my programming skills. If a project will truly work, it will rise to the surface and be better than the others, all while building on the skills from my previous projects.
tyre 11y ago
Side projects also help diversify your perspective. As a founder, I don't want people who are 100% invested in one thing. It sounds good at first, but you run into burnout and narrow-mindedness very quickly. How can you be expected to see your product, company, mission, etc. as part of a larger world if it is your entire world? Most people I meet in SV cannot, and a large part appears to be what percent of their life is wrapped up in their work.
- stevesearer 11y ago
  I really enjoy my line of work, but sometimes the day-to-day work just isn't very creative so every few months I take some time to build a small project that has zero potential to be a "startup". The latest is just a database of local parks that will be sortable by the various features (bbq grills, play grounds, etc). The official city website was terrible, I'll get to have the joy of using it because it was something I wanted, and I learned a few new things about WordPress which is what I work in for my primary job.
  - cableshaft 11y ago
    I've done that with games. I've taken breaks from working on my big, long game to work on something I could knock out in a week. My most popular game ever, Proximity, was one such side project that I conceived, built, and released within a week. Jonathan Blow's talk on Deep Work also recommends doing that to recharge your creative batteries and help break up a long project, and mentions a couple side projects he worked on during The Witness: https://vimeo.com/94259578 https://vimeo.com/94259578
  - tyre 11y ago
    This is really cool! Coincidentally, our company builds software for local governments. What website were you looking at? We don't do that specifically, but we're friends with proudcity.com who do city websites.
  - davidjnelson 11y ago
    I love these and do them too. I built an app to search craigslist in 2007 across multiple neighborhoods and regions and plot the results on a map. This was roughly 6 or 7 years before Craigslist added these features I think. I found a great apartment with it, as did some friends. Fun, and learned some cool stuff. Another one was a Wordpress plugin for Facebook comments before Facebook released the official one and the existing ones were hard to use. People loved it, and again I learned a lot. Side projects rock!
baus 11y ago
Unfortunately many employment agreements prohibit side projects.
- eldavido 11y ago
  My experience (SF) is more like "don't ask, don't tell" If you do something blatantly competitive, e.g. launch a product that competes with your employer's product, try to use employer's customer relationships, you'll get sued. If you do something outright illegal, like steal IP, you're probably going to jail. But most managers I've worked for don't really care if it doesn't affect your day job, and in fact, might quietly encourage it as it lets you scout the new hotness and then bring it back to your day job, if it's good. I suspect the norms around this depend highly on where you work, but I think this attitude is pretty common in SF tech.
  - nostrademons 11y ago
    Your manager probably doesn't care as long as you don't rub it in his face. The company only cares if you're becoming a direct competitor or try to get it to buy back IP that was created on company time anyway. However, potential investors care a lot - this sort of thing shows up in due diligence, and it's negotiating leverage that can be used against you in any potential lawsuit or acquisition. It's fine to do side projects anytime you want - it's not like the company has the ability to restrict what you can do in your free time. But if it looks like the side project may turn into something more than a side project, it may be a good idea to quit your job, throw away the code, and rewrite everything from scratch.
    - outworlder 11y ago
      > this sort of thing shows up in due diligence Everyone throws around the phrase "due diligence", but what exactly does that mean? How is this kind of thing showing up in "due diligence", assuming a side project could be at any stage? Do they interview employees? Go through their social accounts? Github repositories? Lurk at IRC chat rooms?
infodroid 11y ago
Contrary to what this VC believes, it is NOT okay to expect someone to "work 60 hours a week at Facebook and then another 40 hours a week on your side project". Because starting a business should not be founded on giving up your personal life. Quitting your job to focus on your idea full-time is a perfectly reasonable expectation. Investors need to start doing their homework instead of pushing founders to the burnout limit.
- eldavido 11y ago
  If you won't do it, someone else will. Life is all about tradeoffs. Just because someone else's is different than yours, doesn't make it bad/wrong/illegal.
  - forgetsusername 11y ago
    >If you won't do it, someone else will. This mentality can be used to justify far too many stupid things.
    - eldavido 11y ago
      This is why it's important to have limits. As a society, we have laws that make it illegal to cross certain boundaries. As an individual, I'm free to set my own limits on what I'll do. For one, I don't work at facebook or other adtech companies because I think the world has enough advertising and I don't like how phone-addicted people are. I just think it's incredibly naive to assume you can have whatever lifestyle you want and be commercially successful. Success is costly ; you have to, almost by definition, be willing to do things other people aren't. I don't know where this idea that you somehow "deserve" to work "only 60 hours per week" comes from -- I just know that there are a lot of incredibly hard-working people in tech, and it's a high-stakes, high-money game, so you're going to get some outliers.
      - toomuchtodo 11y ago
        > I don't know where this idea that you somehow "deserve" to work "only 60 hours per week" comes from Perhaps you missed labor regulations over the last 200 years during the industrial revolution? That's where these ideas come from, that someone can have a solid quality of life without trading 60-100 hours a week of their life away.
thedevil 11y ago
I do side projects for different reasons: they're a great way to express my creativity. I can create my very own unique solution to a problem, rather than just being a cog in someone else's machine. Edit: not that I mind being a cog if I get a paycheck, but it's not as awesome as creating something new Edit2: and quitting my day job and raising capital would screw everything up for most projects.
- altotrees 11y ago
  This is exactly the same reason I value side projects. Coming up with an elegant, creative solution without being forced into time/system/professional constraints is pretty amazing. I want to use the language, platform and philosophy of my choice when working on things for myself. It reminds me of why I got into this field in the first place.
  - ca98am79 11y ago
    exactly. I have a side project that is doing well and growing, and I feel pressure like I should hire people and try to make it hockey stick growth.. But I love that it is just my thing - more than making it as big as possible. I don't want to create a giant company - I just like making a great product and I don't want the pressure or have to deal with the other stuff.
educar 11y ago
There is a notion that seed funding is very easy to find. Is this really true for normal people ? Does 'facebook' tag somehow magically attrach money these days? How does one begin this process ? Most of my friends are engineers and I know nobody in my friend circle who has raised a seed round.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- dkopi 11y ago
  If you have a good idea and a team that can execute, seed money is still fairly easy - assuming you're actively seeking it, and you have enough proof that you can execute.
- nostrademons 11y ago
  A lot of people aren't actively seeking it. I'm not, and I have a number of former coworkers that have successfully built startups (either been acquired or running profitably) and only about half of them took seed funding. If you're good enough and dedicated enough to execute on your ideas yourself, chances are you were paid pretty well in your past life and have decent savings. (If you weren't, it often makes sense to do a two-step path into a startup, where you write a side project that is impressive but not lucrative, use that as leverage to get a Google/Facebook/etc. job offer, save up a bunch of money, and then seed fund yourself.) And if you've got decent savings, it can often make more sense to avoid the dilution and investor-relations hassles that come with taking investment.
  - vram22 11y ago
    Are you doing a startup?
    - nostrademons 11y ago
      Yeah.
mode80 11y ago
I think for every delicious side project that succeeds "in spite of itself" there are 10 side projects who don't fulfill their destiny of greatness -- because they're missing the dedication ingredient that most startups require.
- matt2000 11y ago
  I think you've nailed the toughest part about working on projects in general, not just side projects - determining whether the thing isn't working or just needs more commitment and time.
  - mode80 11y ago
    So true. Dedication isn't a guarantee; it's more like table stakes. Maybe the trick is to be dedicated to an outcome, not a particular idea.
- beeboop 11y ago
  It would seem to me that the biggest missing piece for most startups is making something people want. I guess you could say dedication is what's missing if that's what you need to go from something people don't want to something they do want. But how far is someone willing to steer away from their dream idea of Facebook for Dogs? And how able are they to actually figure out a problem to solve? My guess is: not very.
emehrkay 11y ago
Who is giving out 250k in seed money these days? Asking for a friend.
- birken 11y ago
  This is a classic comment from a VC perspective that isn't broadly true. From his perspective, all the smart people he knows are getting seed funding easily. However, by definition they are well connected to the VC community (they are friends with him), and the vast majority of people are not. Though YC is probably a small fraction of overall seed funding, the fact that the acceptance ratio into YC is so so small is an indication that the vast majority of people/projects who want seed funding are not getting it. The point is also ridiculous for another reason, which is if you get 250k in seed funding that doesn't mean you can pay yourself a 100k salary. In the short term at least, it is much better for you and your family to get 100k salary+benefits from somewhere else and then work on a project on the side than it would be to quit your job and raise 250k for your side project.
- palakchokshi 11y ago
  In SV if you have pedigree (right schools, right company) you can easily raise $250K. The article talks about raising 250K seed if you leave your job at Facebook. Sure if you worked at Facebook as a dev and you have a decent side project you'll raise that seed very quickly.
- imperialdrive 11y ago
  I'm giving out 2.5 and 25K pretty willy nilly if you give me a good vibe!
  - emehrkay 11y ago
    I should tell you about my side project(s)
dkopi 11y ago
On the other hand, you have paul graham's great post about the top idea in your mind. "It's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.": http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html
- galistoca 11y ago
  > "It's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower." Just because it's a side project doesn't mean you don't think about it in the shower. I never think of dayjob work outside of office hours, rest of the time I'm always thinking about my project, including when I shower.
jkot 11y ago
I disagree wit article. Today there are way more entrepreneurs who turned their side project into business. But today its not about huge "scalable" startup, but more relaxed lifestyle business. And most projects are build within existing system (youtube channel, amazon seller...), so they hide under radar where every business is independent website.
chatmasta 11y ago
He raises a good point that the "barrier to entry" to creating even a side project is getting harder and harder for one person to attain in their spare time. Nowadays an MVP needs to be fairly polished to be useful at all, and often needs to support multiple platforms. And, CRUCIALLY, if you're asking for people's money, there is an expectation of ongoing support. If the business is visibly a side project, clients will be unlikely to purchase from it over a competitor that has a dedicated team working on a similar product. How do your customers know that your side project will not disappear tomorrow? I suspect there is a "chilling effect" that causes a sort of paralysis in developers who are not ready to release their side project unless it's "perfect," because they need to build the product well enough that it does not require constantly supporting customers, responding to help-desk tickets, etc. An MVP is not enough to get real customers on a side project, simply because the barebones nature of it will amplify the support costs, causing strain on the developer and taking time away from perfecting the product.
- guy_c 11y ago
  This is a good quote from http://martinfowler.com/articles/web-security-basics.html http://martinfowler.com/articles/web-security-basics.html The modern software developer has to be something of a swiss army knife. Of course, you need to write code that fulfills customer functional requirements. It needs to be fast. Further you are expected to write this code to be comprehensible and extensible: sufficiently flexible to allow for the evolutionary nature of IT demands, but stable and reliable. You need to be able to lay out a useable interface, optimize a database, and often set up and maintain a delivery pipeline. You need to be able to get these things done by yesterday. Somewhere, way down at the bottom of the list of requirements, behind, fast, cheap, and flexible is “secure”. ------ I'd add to this list, if you are doing a side-project: marketing, SEO, customer acquisition, advertising, customer support, infrastructure support, ...
myth_drannon 11y ago
I have a feeling that the perceived lack of "product" side projects corellates to the rise of Github and "open-source contributions" as a requirement to get a tech interview? People spend all their hobby energy trying to build github portfolios that most of the time is just libraries or contributions to libraries.
avip 11y ago
If you put your life on hold for a year, build that side project, then go pitching to VCs with your MVP and 100 users - you'll be negotiating same terms and seed as if you had never built it. Skipping that garage weekends step makes good sense. Good for your health, good for the project. Only not so good for VCs...
- derefr 11y ago
  To put it another way, the garage weekends step only makes sense if you're never planning on taking investment in the first place. Bootstrapping requires garage weekends (or enough of a nest-egg that engineer-you can work full-time for visionary-you.) The whole point of venture capital is to skip that part. Importantly, a startup with enough sweat put into it that it's now executing on a business model instead of searching for a viable business model is no longer a startup; and if that's the only thing a VC is funding, then that person is not actually a VC, but rather a private-equity investor. (And you could go further, and point out that the whole concept of "private equity" was just for the sake of startups with market risk; and that, having validated their market and eliminated such risk, companies should—according to the spirit of the law—immediately do their IPO. These "venture capitalists"—really just plain-old "capitalists" at this point—would then be forced to compete with every other schlub who wants a piece of the company.
thedogeye 11y ago
Flexport started as a side project. Nobody noticed us until we had enough traction to make it my full time job.
- dilemma 11y ago
  Interesting. If you don't mind me asking here, I've seen you're hiring for your HK office. I'm based in Shenzhen -- will you be hiring here in the future or would you be open to employees commuting to HK? Happy to email you if possible.
soneca 11y ago
Why sucking crowd money through Kickstarter is acceptable but sucking seed money from a professional is not?
Sapph 11y ago
I think the beauty of side projects is it's a low pressure way for people to put their idea out in the world and see what happens. Only difference between a hobby and side project is most side projects start off with a slightly more defined potential to monetize it. And if the project pans out, great! If not, hopefully the side project was you doing something you love anyway so you still had fun and gained a lot of experience. The fact it's now easier (cheaper startup costs for many types of work) to start side projects is a boon for the rest of us. It means every once in a while, someone who would never had considered starting a biz right away but would create something for fun may end up bringing a truly valuable product or service to the world. I started my biz (http://www.artofemails.com http://www.artofemails.com) as a side project. I think seeing it as a side project in the very beginning freed me from feeling I had to do market validation and the whole launch a biz laundry list to just put it (in my case sales email templates) out there. Once it was up and I got really positive feedback, that's when I committed to growing it as a fully fledged business.
patio11 11y ago
There is a thriving community / ecosystem of people doing side projects. It is big enough to support conferences. I'm making my annual pilgrimmage tomorrow to Vegas to attend Microconf, where ~600 people selling software over the Internet are going to be shooting the breeze and talking conversion rates, email marketing, and Slack integrations. As far as I'm aware, only one attendee has been acquired by Yahoo. HN is aware of maybe 10 of them. The next 200? You don't know about them for the same reason you don't know about Petersen Underwriters or Shiodome Accounting. (Who? The most recent two businesses which have had their yearly revenue chart moved not-at-all when I cut them a $1k+ check.) It has not gotten harder to do side projects. Back in 2006, over 25% of my launch budget was to send a fax internationally to send a paper contract to eSellerate (remember them?) for payment processing. These days Stripe exists, and it is better all around. It has not gotten harder to do web development since 2004. Remember when your only options were shared hosting for $4 a month on servers which had two nines of uptime or buying a Dell and learning what colocation meant? These days you can get a reliably hosted VPS for ~$20. Remember when your only option for interactive scripts on the Internet was teaching yourself perl and /cgi-bin/? Rails exists now. Rails is a much, much more productive environment. Remember when shareware marketing consisted of paying $200 to magazines so you could get a little ad in the back of them and pray that 20+ people bought your think, such that 20 * $25 > $200? These days you do scalable online marketing approaches and sell products which have the same technical complexity as $25 shareware but, crucially, have LTVs in the mid-thousands or higher. (SaaS billing!)
- herval 11y ago
  I think comparing the "web 2.0" era (2006+) with magazine distribution is a bit too distant - but imho, things have really been getting too competitive as of late, and that explains a bit of a reduction on the number of side projects. My personal experience: it got easier to build (although not that much since 2008 or so, to be honest), but my feeling is that there's just TOO MANY projects happening, and too few people actually looking at them at all. I feel people are just saturated, and that's a direct reflection of all that easiness (is that a word?) + the web and mobile converging to a handful of very addictive gatekeepers. My first couple side-projects (launched in 2006 and 2008) turned into respectable revenue sources (at least for a long while) with very little effort - and a small user-base (both were ad supported). I launched other stuff ever since - a terribly designed mobile app in 2010, on a niche field (QR code reading!) netted thousands of downloads. Then it started to get crowded. My most recent toy apps barely got a download. Some web experiments got dozens to thousands of signups (after, say, a product hunt launch), but retention is just tending to zero. On the flipside of that (as an early adopter), I find myself signing up to more and more landing pages of things that either never launch or I just lose interest when they do. Dunno why. It's just a point of data, of course. Maybe I ran out of good ideas or I'm just barking the wrong tree. Anyway, just my 2 grouchy cents.
lowglow 11y ago
I REALLY REALLY want to help people test out these ideas early on with their community and grow social proof with real capital from their networks. Check out http://baqqer.com/ http://baqqer.com/ to help grow your side project and your community simultaneously.
- nathantross 11y ago
  Hey this is Nathan, co-founder of Baqqer. Just to echo what Dan just said, we built baqqer with the idea that individual creators/makers/developers/designers should be able to test out their ideas with minimum effort to see if they have legs. Unlike Kickstarter where users need to have their product costs down to the penny, we let users build community and long-term funding around their ideas(side-projects) until they prove the model. This allows for pivoting, product recognition, and idea validation. We see ourselves as a pre-kickstarter platform.
  - vram22 11y ago
    >Baqqer This may be the first time I've liked a Web 2.0-style name like that :-) - since Web 2 started in 2006-odd. I kid you not.
    - lowglow 11y ago
      Thanks! Funny story: I pitched an early group of investors this idea, and they stopped me and asked me why I settled on this name. I replied, "Because the domain was available." and the entire room erupted in laughter. Pretty solid experience.
abalashov 11y ago
My personal experience working full-time and working on side projects over several years in my early twenties has led me to a relatively pessimistic take on the idea, at least from the perspective of realistically building something serious and taking it to market. It wasn't until I actually quit (more precisely, got fired) and went out on my own that I was able to produce anything non-trivial, although I'm entirely bootstrapped and never took any investment. Some of it might just be that I had demanding jobs. It's true that the network service provider arena is particularly 24/7. However, I went through half a dozen jobs between 18 and 22, and some afforded me plenty of free time outside the 9-5. With the easy jobs, I was demoralised, frustrated and/or bored, which didn't lead to a lot of spiritual energy for pursuing side projects diligently. With the more intense jobs, I was so busy that I had to try to squeeze in my side projects in the after-10 PM bracket. This all presumed no social life to speak of, by the way; the moment life even vaguely threatened social engagements, it was all out the window. Worse yet, staying up till 5 AM working on my side projects and trying to make it in at 9 AM for my actual job wasn't sustainable. It was arguably the immediate reason that led to my firing from the last job I actually had. It's not just a time thing, of course; sitting in an office all day is draining, even if one's job isn't very demanding. Even with my bright-eyed, bushy-tailed energy at 20, I often came home exhausted and would often spend my side project time just looking at the screen without getting much done. And, as I said, this is _without_ factoring in any other concerns whatsoever -- social life, personal life, working out, errands, grocery shopping, etc. Anyway, maybe some people can do it, but in my view, this is no way to build something serious. I didn't start really making progress until I could afford to go "all in" with my time and energy. Also, it's important to remember that one is competing with folks who _do_ have the luxury of working on their venture on a full time-ish basis. That's quadruply important if go-to-market time is a serious linchpin of the venture. Of course, the problem of bootstrapping while having a relatively high personal expense base is that the inevitable consulting required to support it sucks up all of one's time in the same way the day job used to (but with much higher economic stress and cash flow volatility), so it's not that going into business for myself opened up unparalleled opportunities to build product, either. However, even so, it beat grinding myself to powder. EDIT: In one of my less intense jobs, I tried the approach of crashing out as soon as I came home (e.g. 7 PM) and waking up at 2 AM to spend my "best hours" on development. The actual day job could have the sloppy seconds; it wasn't a development job and didn't ask much of me. That was all good and fine, as long as one is comfortable with exactly two modes of existence: sleeping or sitting at a computer.
sideproject 11y ago
People are building/running/coding side projects more than ever before! I run sideprojectors.com (http://www.sideprojectors.com http://www.sideprojectors.com) - it's a place where people can sell/buy/show off side projects and we've been receiving increasing number of side projects over the last few years. To my surprise, a lot of projects are also getting sold. Whether they go on to become big companies or not, I'm not sure - but many are building stuff.
encoderer 11y ago
My co-founder and started Cronitor as a side project, now I usually call it a side business. I'd consider a seed round, and angel investors have told us we could raise money at a 7-figure valuation. I'm sure we could grow faster, but I also enjoy it for what it is: passive-ish income. We develop features because we want to, and we've built a stable service with few operational problems and minimal customer service demands. I say, let the side projects roll.
dreamdu5t 11y ago
Maybe it's that more side-projects are being bootstrapped rather than VC funded? It doesn't seem Fred Wilson has thought about that.

238 points by pointnova 11y ago

WA 11y ago

> I suspect that some of that is the effort to build and launch something that can reach broad adoption is harder. No, it's just that getting attention is a lot harder. Side projects – by its very nature – are exactly that: Some stuff happening on the side and the trash can is an even more certain path than for most startups. Without any visibility, side projects won't turn into companies. This doesn't mean that there are no side projects. There are probably more than ever, because everybody tries to get into the startup hamster wheel with their little idea.

galistoca 11y ago
If anything I think getting attention has become much easier compared to say 5 years ago. You used to have to go to Techcrunch and their friends to get covered or your project would never have any other means of getting significant attention for the launch. Nowadays sites like HN and Product Hunt provide pretty much democratized way of getting attention for your projects. On the other hand, getting meaningful adoption has indeed become harder, exactly because getting attention has become easier. There are too many projects and startups launching everyday that even if you place 1st on PH or HN today, tomorrow people are onto the next shiny thing.
- WA 11y ago
  If you launch a product for Non-English people, there is no HN and no PH. Even if you launch a product in English, there's HN, there's PH and that's about it. You better have another way to reach an audience, because HN & PH are one-shots – especially if you just try a thing or two marketing-wise for your side-project, but don't spend too much time and money on marketing.
  - galistoca 11y ago
    Those I mentioned are just a few. You have Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and all kinds of social media where you can get exposure, which didn't exist several years ago. You really had to chase journalists at conferences, buy a PR firm to reach out to them, get an intro to these guys, or just send a cold email and hope for the best. Now at least you can control your own destiny.
    - palakchokshi 11y ago
      Having built and launched 2 products that started as side projects, I know how difficult it is to get visibility. The avenues you mention are long shots considering the sheer number of things that get posted on those mediums. You get lost in noise faster than you can hit refresh. What you need is evangelists. People who noticed your product and were "socially influential" enough to spread it to a significant number of your target audience. That is a rare occurrence.
      - galistoca 11y ago
        Everyone who's downvoting or criticizing me is basically saying "yeah whatever, but it's easier said than done", and that is totally true. But you guys are missing my point, I'm saying objectively there are more avenues for exposure than before. 10 years ago, you really had to use PR agencies and send out press releases, do analyst briefings, and nurture relationship with journalists in order to get the word out. There really weren't many other ways to do this. If you were a small startup it was very hard to get exposure (and like you say, you need evangelists, but even that was harder in the past simply because small startups had no easy way to get the word out) Compare that to nowadays, you're playing on very much level field. There's a big difference between "it's not so easy although it's possible if I try hard enough" vs. "it's virtually impossible".
        palakchokshi 11y ago
        I see your point that there are more avenues available than before but more avenues != easier to get your product noticed. I think that's where others and me disagree with your premise. I employed all those avenues to promote my 2 products. Anecdotal evidence from end is that a post on HN by someone with high karma still got me all of 200 visits to the website. Getting on the Featured List on PH got 2 signups and 50 upvotes and a total of 156 visits to the website. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ combined totaled 300+ visits to the website.
- blackrose 11y ago
  Product Hunt is really only "democratized" if you know someone who can post to the Featured list. For the rest of us, it's either the obscurity of the "Newest" list, or basically the same exact process as getting covered by someone at TC.
  - galistoca 11y ago
    Let's not battle with semantics. There are more venues to get exposure nowadays and the gatekeepers at these venues have much less power than the ones that came before, hence more democratized than 5 years ago.
    - enraged_camel 11y ago
      It's not "semantics" if the end result is the same, which is that you need to beg certain gatekeepers to give your product exposure. The fact that there are more of those gatekeepers now doesn't mean the process is more "democratized."
      - galistoca 11y ago
        Can't believe I keep feeding you guys stuff so I can get even more downvoted, but this almost feels like talking to a wall. This is my last comment on this thread because I know you'll probably say I'm wrong again, but I'll try my best to explain. 5 years ago if you built a cool project or startup you would pitch TechCrunch, Mashable, etc. (a handful of sites), and that was it. Most likely it would have been ignored. Then there's not much you can do. Nowadays there's room for creativity. You can even reach out to people on Twitter via @messages and get their attention. That didn't exist before. Also you guys make it sound like getting through the Product Hunt "gatekeepers" is some mission impossible but that only means you haven't tried, because if you tried you would know that they are also people just like you and want to share cool products. My point is, in the past, unless you spend lots of money you had little power over whether your project gets attention or not. Nowadays if you're on HN complaining about how it's same as back then, you're probably doing it wrong. There are tons of ways you can get exposure for your projects and you're not trying hard enough or not being creative enough if you're saying it's the same.
- nostrademons 11y ago
  The absolute number of venues where you can get attention has increased, but the number of projects competing for that attention is increasing faster. The amount of attention available per project goes down.
- herval 11y ago
  I feel getting a megaphone has become considerably easier - try putting up anything on, say, betalist, and you'll get dozens and dozens of bots tweeting at you, offering free megaphones. Now getting _attention_? I feel everything is competing with autoplay videos on Facebook now. Microseconds of mindshare.
JMiao 11y ago
fred's point is that competing for attention these days feels like you have to build broader, which is something you see a lot and probably contradicts the one secret weapon startups possess, focus.
shopkins 11y ago
Right, everyone is still experimenting on the side now especially because those little ideas are the best route to autonomy. And if you have a wide breadth of skills in the field, a startup is often the only way (I've found) to finally gain the freedom to use all of them.
- api 11y ago
  > if you have a wide breadth of skills in the field, a startup is often the only way (I've found) to finally gain the freedom to use all of them. That's a great point, and is a major factor that led me into startups. Doing a startup is the only time I've ever had a job that feels like my time is not being wasted. With everything else I feel under-challenged, under-utilized, and pigeonholed.
  - shopkins 11y ago
    Same! When either building something myself or with under 5 people I've been able to use all my knowledge and truly stretch myself. But I've also worked at a "startup" with the wrong people in charge, where I was completely under-utilized and couldn't get challenging work despite asking for it. The chance for fulfilling work though, I think, is the biggest draw.

draw_down 11y ago

Easy to quit and get seed funding, sure. But when it's time to raise an A round...

acconrad 11y ago

This is a great point - experimentation is huge and a big part of my own growth as an entrepreneur. To me I feel better knowing my side project work isn't sucking up someone's money when it doesn't work out, and I'm building my programming skills. If a project will truly work, it will rise to the surface and be better than the others, all while building on the skills from my previous projects.

tyre 11y ago

Side projects also help diversify your perspective. As a founder, I don't want people who are 100% invested in one thing. It sounds good at first, but you run into burnout and narrow-mindedness very quickly. How can you be expected to see your product, company, mission, etc. as part of a larger world if it is your entire world? Most people I meet in SV cannot, and a large part appears to be what percent of their life is wrapped up in their work.

stevesearer 11y ago
I really enjoy my line of work, but sometimes the day-to-day work just isn't very creative so every few months I take some time to build a small project that has zero potential to be a "startup". The latest is just a database of local parks that will be sortable by the various features (bbq grills, play grounds, etc). The official city website was terrible, I'll get to have the joy of using it because it was something I wanted, and I learned a few new things about WordPress which is what I work in for my primary job.
- cableshaft 11y ago
  I've done that with games. I've taken breaks from working on my big, long game to work on something I could knock out in a week. My most popular game ever, Proximity, was one such side project that I conceived, built, and released within a week. Jonathan Blow's talk on Deep Work also recommends doing that to recharge your creative batteries and help break up a long project, and mentions a couple side projects he worked on during The Witness: https://vimeo.com/94259578 https://vimeo.com/94259578
- tyre 11y ago
  This is really cool! Coincidentally, our company builds software for local governments. What website were you looking at? We don't do that specifically, but we're friends with proudcity.com who do city websites.
- davidjnelson 11y ago
  I love these and do them too. I built an app to search craigslist in 2007 across multiple neighborhoods and regions and plot the results on a map. This was roughly 6 or 7 years before Craigslist added these features I think. I found a great apartment with it, as did some friends. Fun, and learned some cool stuff. Another one was a Wordpress plugin for Facebook comments before Facebook released the official one and the existing ones were hard to use. People loved it, and again I learned a lot. Side projects rock!

baus 11y ago

Unfortunately many employment agreements prohibit side projects.

eldavido 11y ago
My experience (SF) is more like "don't ask, don't tell" If you do something blatantly competitive, e.g. launch a product that competes with your employer's product, try to use employer's customer relationships, you'll get sued. If you do something outright illegal, like steal IP, you're probably going to jail. But most managers I've worked for don't really care if it doesn't affect your day job, and in fact, might quietly encourage it as it lets you scout the new hotness and then bring it back to your day job, if it's good. I suspect the norms around this depend highly on where you work, but I think this attitude is pretty common in SF tech.
- nostrademons 11y ago
  Your manager probably doesn't care as long as you don't rub it in his face. The company only cares if you're becoming a direct competitor or try to get it to buy back IP that was created on company time anyway. However, potential investors care a lot - this sort of thing shows up in due diligence, and it's negotiating leverage that can be used against you in any potential lawsuit or acquisition. It's fine to do side projects anytime you want - it's not like the company has the ability to restrict what you can do in your free time. But if it looks like the side project may turn into something more than a side project, it may be a good idea to quit your job, throw away the code, and rewrite everything from scratch.
  - outworlder 11y ago
    > this sort of thing shows up in due diligence Everyone throws around the phrase "due diligence", but what exactly does that mean? How is this kind of thing showing up in "due diligence", assuming a side project could be at any stage? Do they interview employees? Go through their social accounts? Github repositories? Lurk at IRC chat rooms?

infodroid 11y ago

Contrary to what this VC believes, it is NOT okay to expect someone to "work 60 hours a week at Facebook and then another 40 hours a week on your side project". Because starting a business should not be founded on giving up your personal life. Quitting your job to focus on your idea full-time is a perfectly reasonable expectation. Investors need to start doing their homework instead of pushing founders to the burnout limit.

eldavido 11y ago
If you won't do it, someone else will. Life is all about tradeoffs. Just because someone else's is different than yours, doesn't make it bad/wrong/illegal.
- forgetsusername 11y ago
  >If you won't do it, someone else will. This mentality can be used to justify far too many stupid things.
  - eldavido 11y ago
    This is why it's important to have limits. As a society, we have laws that make it illegal to cross certain boundaries. As an individual, I'm free to set my own limits on what I'll do. For one, I don't work at facebook or other adtech companies because I think the world has enough advertising and I don't like how phone-addicted people are. I just think it's incredibly naive to assume you can have whatever lifestyle you want and be commercially successful. Success is costly ; you have to, almost by definition, be willing to do things other people aren't. I don't know where this idea that you somehow "deserve" to work "only 60 hours per week" comes from -- I just know that there are a lot of incredibly hard-working people in tech, and it's a high-stakes, high-money game, so you're going to get some outliers.
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      > I don't know where this idea that you somehow "deserve" to work "only 60 hours per week" comes from Perhaps you missed labor regulations over the last 200 years during the industrial revolution? That's where these ideas come from, that someone can have a solid quality of life without trading 60-100 hours a week of their life away.

thedevil 11y ago

I do side projects for different reasons: they're a great way to express my creativity. I can create my very own unique solution to a problem, rather than just being a cog in someone else's machine. Edit: not that I mind being a cog if I get a paycheck, but it's not as awesome as creating something new Edit2: and quitting my day job and raising capital would screw everything up for most projects.

altotrees 11y ago
This is exactly the same reason I value side projects. Coming up with an elegant, creative solution without being forced into time/system/professional constraints is pretty amazing. I want to use the language, platform and philosophy of my choice when working on things for myself. It reminds me of why I got into this field in the first place.
- ca98am79 11y ago
  exactly. I have a side project that is doing well and growing, and I feel pressure like I should hire people and try to make it hockey stick growth.. But I love that it is just my thing - more than making it as big as possible. I don't want to create a giant company - I just like making a great product and I don't want the pressure or have to deal with the other stuff.

educar 11y ago

There is a notion that seed funding is very easy to find. Is this really true for normal people ? Does 'facebook' tag somehow magically attrach money these days? How does one begin this process ? Most of my friends are engineers and I know nobody in my friend circle who has raised a seed round.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
dkopi 11y ago
If you have a good idea and a team that can execute, seed money is still fairly easy - assuming you're actively seeking it, and you have enough proof that you can execute.
nostrademons 11y ago
A lot of people aren't actively seeking it. I'm not, and I have a number of former coworkers that have successfully built startups (either been acquired or running profitably) and only about half of them took seed funding. If you're good enough and dedicated enough to execute on your ideas yourself, chances are you were paid pretty well in your past life and have decent savings. (If you weren't, it often makes sense to do a two-step path into a startup, where you write a side project that is impressive but not lucrative, use that as leverage to get a Google/Facebook/etc. job offer, save up a bunch of money, and then seed fund yourself.) And if you've got decent savings, it can often make more sense to avoid the dilution and investor-relations hassles that come with taking investment.
- vram22 11y ago
  Are you doing a startup?
  - nostrademons 11y ago
    Yeah.

mode80 11y ago

I think for every delicious side project that succeeds "in spite of itself" there are 10 side projects who don't fulfill their destiny of greatness -- because they're missing the dedication ingredient that most startups require.

matt2000 11y ago
I think you've nailed the toughest part about working on projects in general, not just side projects - determining whether the thing isn't working or just needs more commitment and time.
- mode80 11y ago
  So true. Dedication isn't a guarantee; it's more like table stakes. Maybe the trick is to be dedicated to an outcome, not a particular idea.
beeboop 11y ago
It would seem to me that the biggest missing piece for most startups is making something people want. I guess you could say dedication is what's missing if that's what you need to go from something people don't want to something they do want. But how far is someone willing to steer away from their dream idea of Facebook for Dogs? And how able are they to actually figure out a problem to solve? My guess is: not very.

emehrkay 11y ago

Who is giving out 250k in seed money these days? Asking for a friend.

birken 11y ago
This is a classic comment from a VC perspective that isn't broadly true. From his perspective, all the smart people he knows are getting seed funding easily. However, by definition they are well connected to the VC community (they are friends with him), and the vast majority of people are not. Though YC is probably a small fraction of overall seed funding, the fact that the acceptance ratio into YC is so so small is an indication that the vast majority of people/projects who want seed funding are not getting it. The point is also ridiculous for another reason, which is if you get 250k in seed funding that doesn't mean you can pay yourself a 100k salary. In the short term at least, it is much better for you and your family to get 100k salary+benefits from somewhere else and then work on a project on the side than it would be to quit your job and raise 250k for your side project.
palakchokshi 11y ago
In SV if you have pedigree (right schools, right company) you can easily raise $250K. The article talks about raising 250K seed if you leave your job at Facebook. Sure if you worked at Facebook as a dev and you have a decent side project you'll raise that seed very quickly.
imperialdrive 11y ago
I'm giving out 2.5 and 25K pretty willy nilly if you give me a good vibe!
- emehrkay 11y ago
  I should tell you about my side project(s)

dkopi 11y ago

On the other hand, you have paul graham's great post about the top idea in your mind. "It's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.": http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html

galistoca 11y ago
> "It's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower." Just because it's a side project doesn't mean you don't think about it in the shower. I never think of dayjob work outside of office hours, rest of the time I'm always thinking about my project, including when I shower.

jkot 11y ago

I disagree wit article. Today there are way more entrepreneurs who turned their side project into business. But today its not about huge "scalable" startup, but more relaxed lifestyle business. And most projects are build within existing system (youtube channel, amazon seller...), so they hide under radar where every business is independent website.

chatmasta 11y ago

He raises a good point that the "barrier to entry" to creating even a side project is getting harder and harder for one person to attain in their spare time. Nowadays an MVP needs to be fairly polished to be useful at all, and often needs to support multiple platforms. And, CRUCIALLY, if you're asking for people's money, there is an expectation of ongoing support. If the business is visibly a side project, clients will be unlikely to purchase from it over a competitor that has a dedicated team working on a similar product. How do your customers know that your side project will not disappear tomorrow? I suspect there is a "chilling effect" that causes a sort of paralysis in developers who are not ready to release their side project unless it's "perfect," because they need to build the product well enough that it does not require constantly supporting customers, responding to help-desk tickets, etc. An MVP is not enough to get real customers on a side project, simply because the barebones nature of it will amplify the support costs, causing strain on the developer and taking time away from perfecting the product.

guy_c 11y ago
This is a good quote from http://martinfowler.com/articles/web-security-basics.html http://martinfowler.com/articles/web-security-basics.html The modern software developer has to be something of a swiss army knife. Of course, you need to write code that fulfills customer functional requirements. It needs to be fast. Further you are expected to write this code to be comprehensible and extensible: sufficiently flexible to allow for the evolutionary nature of IT demands, but stable and reliable. You need to be able to lay out a useable interface, optimize a database, and often set up and maintain a delivery pipeline. You need to be able to get these things done by yesterday. Somewhere, way down at the bottom of the list of requirements, behind, fast, cheap, and flexible is “secure”. ------ I'd add to this list, if you are doing a side-project: marketing, SEO, customer acquisition, advertising, customer support, infrastructure support, ...

myth_drannon 11y ago

I have a feeling that the perceived lack of "product" side projects corellates to the rise of Github and "open-source contributions" as a requirement to get a tech interview? People spend all their hobby energy trying to build github portfolios that most of the time is just libraries or contributions to libraries.

avip 11y ago

If you put your life on hold for a year, build that side project, then go pitching to VCs with your MVP and 100 users - you'll be negotiating same terms and seed as if you had never built it. Skipping that garage weekends step makes good sense. Good for your health, good for the project. Only not so good for VCs...

derefr 11y ago
To put it another way, the garage weekends step only makes sense if you're never planning on taking investment in the first place. Bootstrapping requires garage weekends (or enough of a nest-egg that engineer-you can work full-time for visionary-you.) The whole point of venture capital is to skip that part. Importantly, a startup with enough sweat put into it that it's now executing on a business model instead of searching for a viable business model is no longer a startup; and if that's the only thing a VC is funding, then that person is not actually a VC, but rather a private-equity investor. (And you could go further, and point out that the whole concept of "private equity" was just for the sake of startups with market risk; and that, having validated their market and eliminated such risk, companies should—according to the spirit of the law—immediately do their IPO. These "venture capitalists"—really just plain-old "capitalists" at this point—would then be forced to compete with every other schlub who wants a piece of the company.

thedogeye 11y ago

Flexport started as a side project. Nobody noticed us until we had enough traction to make it my full time job.

dilemma 11y ago
Interesting. If you don't mind me asking here, I've seen you're hiring for your HK office. I'm based in Shenzhen -- will you be hiring here in the future or would you be open to employees commuting to HK? Happy to email you if possible.

soneca 11y ago

Why sucking crowd money through Kickstarter is acceptable but sucking seed money from a professional is not?

Sapph 11y ago

I think the beauty of side projects is it's a low pressure way for people to put their idea out in the world and see what happens. Only difference between a hobby and side project is most side projects start off with a slightly more defined potential to monetize it. And if the project pans out, great! If not, hopefully the side project was you doing something you love anyway so you still had fun and gained a lot of experience. The fact it's now easier (cheaper startup costs for many types of work) to start side projects is a boon for the rest of us. It means every once in a while, someone who would never had considered starting a biz right away but would create something for fun may end up bringing a truly valuable product or service to the world. I started my biz (http://www.artofemails.com http://www.artofemails.com) as a side project. I think seeing it as a side project in the very beginning freed me from feeling I had to do market validation and the whole launch a biz laundry list to just put it (in my case sales email templates) out there. Once it was up and I got really positive feedback, that's when I committed to growing it as a fully fledged business.

patio11 11y ago

There is a thriving community / ecosystem of people doing side projects. It is big enough to support conferences. I'm making my annual pilgrimmage tomorrow to Vegas to attend Microconf, where ~600 people selling software over the Internet are going to be shooting the breeze and talking conversion rates, email marketing, and Slack integrations. As far as I'm aware, only one attendee has been acquired by Yahoo. HN is aware of maybe 10 of them. The next 200? You don't know about them for the same reason you don't know about Petersen Underwriters or Shiodome Accounting. (Who? The most recent two businesses which have had their yearly revenue chart moved not-at-all when I cut them a $1k+ check.) It has not gotten harder to do side projects. Back in 2006, over 25% of my launch budget was to send a fax internationally to send a paper contract to eSellerate (remember them?) for payment processing. These days Stripe exists, and it is better all around. It has not gotten harder to do web development since 2004. Remember when your only options were shared hosting for $4 a month on servers which had two nines of uptime or buying a Dell and learning what colocation meant? These days you can get a reliably hosted VPS for ~$20. Remember when your only option for interactive scripts on the Internet was teaching yourself perl and /cgi-bin/? Rails exists now. Rails is a much, much more productive environment. Remember when shareware marketing consisted of paying $200 to magazines so you could get a little ad in the back of them and pray that 20+ people bought your think, such that 20 * $25 > $200? These days you do scalable online marketing approaches and sell products which have the same technical complexity as $25 shareware but, crucially, have LTVs in the mid-thousands or higher. (SaaS billing!)

herval 11y ago
I think comparing the "web 2.0" era (2006+) with magazine distribution is a bit too distant - but imho, things have really been getting too competitive as of late, and that explains a bit of a reduction on the number of side projects. My personal experience: it got easier to build (although not that much since 2008 or so, to be honest), but my feeling is that there's just TOO MANY projects happening, and too few people actually looking at them at all. I feel people are just saturated, and that's a direct reflection of all that easiness (is that a word?) + the web and mobile converging to a handful of very addictive gatekeepers. My first couple side-projects (launched in 2006 and 2008) turned into respectable revenue sources (at least for a long while) with very little effort - and a small user-base (both were ad supported). I launched other stuff ever since - a terribly designed mobile app in 2010, on a niche field (QR code reading!) netted thousands of downloads. Then it started to get crowded. My most recent toy apps barely got a download. Some web experiments got dozens to thousands of signups (after, say, a product hunt launch), but retention is just tending to zero. On the flipside of that (as an early adopter), I find myself signing up to more and more landing pages of things that either never launch or I just lose interest when they do. Dunno why. It's just a point of data, of course. Maybe I ran out of good ideas or I'm just barking the wrong tree. Anyway, just my 2 grouchy cents.

lowglow 11y ago

I REALLY REALLY want to help people test out these ideas early on with their community and grow social proof with real capital from their networks. Check out http://baqqer.com/ http://baqqer.com/ to help grow your side project and your community simultaneously.

nathantross 11y ago
Hey this is Nathan, co-founder of Baqqer. Just to echo what Dan just said, we built baqqer with the idea that individual creators/makers/developers/designers should be able to test out their ideas with minimum effort to see if they have legs. Unlike Kickstarter where users need to have their product costs down to the penny, we let users build community and long-term funding around their ideas(side-projects) until they prove the model. This allows for pivoting, product recognition, and idea validation. We see ourselves as a pre-kickstarter platform.
- vram22 11y ago
  >Baqqer This may be the first time I've liked a Web 2.0-style name like that :-) - since Web 2 started in 2006-odd. I kid you not.
  - lowglow 11y ago
    Thanks! Funny story: I pitched an early group of investors this idea, and they stopped me and asked me why I settled on this name. I replied, "Because the domain was available." and the entire room erupted in laughter. Pretty solid experience.

abalashov 11y ago

My personal experience working full-time and working on side projects over several years in my early twenties has led me to a relatively pessimistic take on the idea, at least from the perspective of realistically building something serious and taking it to market. It wasn't until I actually quit (more precisely, got fired) and went out on my own that I was able to produce anything non-trivial, although I'm entirely bootstrapped and never took any investment. Some of it might just be that I had demanding jobs. It's true that the network service provider arena is particularly 24/7. However, I went through half a dozen jobs between 18 and 22, and some afforded me plenty of free time outside the 9-5. With the easy jobs, I was demoralised, frustrated and/or bored, which didn't lead to a lot of spiritual energy for pursuing side projects diligently. With the more intense jobs, I was so busy that I had to try to squeeze in my side projects in the after-10 PM bracket. This all presumed no social life to speak of, by the way; the moment life even vaguely threatened social engagements, it was all out the window. Worse yet, staying up till 5 AM working on my side projects and trying to make it in at 9 AM for my actual job wasn't sustainable. It was arguably the immediate reason that led to my firing from the last job I actually had. It's not just a time thing, of course; sitting in an office all day is draining, even if one's job isn't very demanding. Even with my bright-eyed, bushy-tailed energy at 20, I often came home exhausted and would often spend my side project time just looking at the screen without getting much done. And, as I said, this is _without_ factoring in any other concerns whatsoever -- social life, personal life, working out, errands, grocery shopping, etc. Anyway, maybe some people can do it, but in my view, this is no way to build something serious. I didn't start really making progress until I could afford to go "all in" with my time and energy. Also, it's important to remember that one is competing with folks who _do_ have the luxury of working on their venture on a full time-ish basis. That's quadruply important if go-to-market time is a serious linchpin of the venture. Of course, the problem of bootstrapping while having a relatively high personal expense base is that the inevitable consulting required to support it sucks up all of one's time in the same way the day job used to (but with much higher economic stress and cash flow volatility), so it's not that going into business for myself opened up unparalleled opportunities to build product, either. However, even so, it beat grinding myself to powder. EDIT: In one of my less intense jobs, I tried the approach of crashing out as soon as I came home (e.g. 7 PM) and waking up at 2 AM to spend my "best hours" on development. The actual day job could have the sloppy seconds; it wasn't a development job and didn't ask much of me. That was all good and fine, as long as one is comfortable with exactly two modes of existence: sleeping or sitting at a computer.

sideproject 11y ago

People are building/running/coding side projects more than ever before! I run sideprojectors.com (http://www.sideprojectors.com http://www.sideprojectors.com) - it's a place where people can sell/buy/show off side projects and we've been receiving increasing number of side projects over the last few years. To my surprise, a lot of projects are also getting sold. Whether they go on to become big companies or not, I'm not sure - but many are building stuff.

encoderer 11y ago

My co-founder and started Cronitor as a side project, now I usually call it a side business. I'd consider a seed round, and angel investors have told us we could raise money at a 7-figure valuation. I'm sure we could grow faster, but I also enjoy it for what it is: passive-ish income. We develop features because we want to, and we've built a stable service with few operational problems and minimal customer service demands. I say, let the side projects roll.

dreamdu5t 11y ago

Maybe it's that more side-projects are being bootstrapped rather than VC funded? It doesn't seem Fred Wilson has thought about that.